Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition has serious problems to fix before launch

PAX West demo may or may not be indicative of final PC product—I sure hope not.

SEATTLE—Square Enix got into PC gamers' good graces after a major August announcement about Final Fantasy XV. The RPG will land on Windows sometime in "early 2018," and while that's a pretty long wait after its late-2016 console launch, PC gamers were at least assured they'd see PC-specific improvements such as full 4K resolution.

Further Reading

The studio followed that announcement two weeks later by inviting Ars Technica to one of the world's first looks at this PC version's in-development build. After my behind-closed-doors, hands-on demo at this weekend's PAX West 2017, however, I have nothing but bad news to report.

This clearly unfinished build of FFXV: Windows Edition could have most or all of its glaring issues resolved by the time "early 2018" rolls around, but we couldn't let such a disastrous demo go by without sending a wishlist to Square Enix. You guys have work to do, beginning with the following big-deal problems:

Ghastly keyboard and mouse performance

The kiosk for FFXV: Windows Edition had a convenient keyboard and mouse control guide next to its keyboard, which contained a combination of sensible and WTF-worthy key assignments. (Weirdest of them all was the studio's choice to assign the "sprint" button to the tab key, while leaving the more common PC-sprint key of left-shift entirely unmapped.)

Bigger problems arose when I got into battle and realized none of these mapped keys let me pull off the game's important warp-strike attack. FFXV's main hero Noctis must warp-strike in order to either attack enemies on the other side of a skirmish or latch onto a high-up hanging point for the sake of safety and recovery. I died repeatedly in the two battles got into as a result. (And since you're surely going to ask: No, the "F" button as marked on the keyboard map above didn't do the trick.)

None of the Square Enix representatives at the event was able to trigger the warp-strike attack using the keyboard, as well, and one admitted that I was the first person to play the PC demo using anything other than a nearby Xbox One gamepad. Perhaps that was because the in-game UI never reflected my control choice. Instead, every on-screen prompt included gamepad button and direction icons. The in-game menus did not allow me to remap any of the keys, either.

I imagine this is a "takes only five minutes to implement" fix... but how in the heck did Square Enix let a PC version out of its offices without any keyboard-specific tweaks enabled?

No video menu of any kind

The menus also lacked toggles for any visual settings. This may have simply owed to the game's incomplete development state, as its developers may just use a debug menu or INI files at this point. But I found it curious that the game had a complete, console-grade series of menus for various gameplay options and yet had zero visual selectors built into the UI at this point. No way to play with anti-aliasing options; no resolution or ratio selectors; nothing.

Japanese game developers have gone a long way in recent years to opening up more visual options in their console-to-PC ports. Square Enix needs to know that anything less than total access to PC settings is already unacceptable in 2017, let alone next year. Fans will rally behind the scenes to implement workarounds, anyway. Please save them the trouble.

A slice of FFXV PC screenshots from Gamescom.

A lack of full 4K resolution

Without that visual menu, I couldn't clarify one of the more confusing things about my demo: Its clear inability to scale at full 4K resolution. Square Enix elected to use a reference-grade Dell monitor for this demo. I'm very familiar with it, having tested one of the exact same model for a few months. After tapping through the monitor's physical menu buttons, I confirmed that the game was technically running in 3840x2160 resolution.

However, the amount of fuzzy pixel rendering I saw was nowhere near a perfect pixel mapping. Again, I tested this exact monitor a ton while first educating myself about the 4K difference. There's no way I can perfectly estimate pixel counts by glancing at a screen, but I could easily tell: this wasn't up to 4K snuff.

In good news, that means FFXV: Windows Edition could ship with a native resolution scaler, which would go a long way towards performance efficiency for, say, GTX 1060 or 1070 owners who want to edge towards 4K resolution and still enjoy smooth frame rate performance. However, if this fuzzy performance was the result of a default, mandatory "checkerboarding" effect to simulate 4K resolution, then we're going to have a problem.

Performance shy of 30 frames a second

The demo's sub-4K resolution didn't help FFXV: Windows Edition. My demo ran at a refresh rate well below 30 frames per second. This was particularly insane to me, because I'd played an in-development version of FFXV all the way back in 2015 running on a PC. That one locked into a 30 FPS rate on a regular basis, even in its unfinished, wonky state.

But FFXV: Windows Edition couldn't get there. Cut scenes, open-air outdoor runs, drives along a highway, and even moments perusing shops and other interior areas all chugged in that regular, "needs more power" way, as opposed to the kinds of breaks, stutters, or pauses that I commonly see while giving preview builds of games the benefit of the doubt.

The PC I tested this demo on included a placard that read something like "Final Fantasy XV, powered by Alienware." If I were on the Alienware PR team, I'd demand a retraction, a cookie bouquet, or something.

Assets that aren't 4K quality

Speaking of interior scenes, most textures in FFXV: Windows Edition still render at the same 1080p-friendly resolution found on the console versions. Will FFXV: Windows Edition include any rescaled assets or textures for the sake of PC power users whose systems' bandwidth can afford higher-res textures? Square Enix representatives couldn't answer that question at the event.

Further Reading

The one thing I can say is that some visual effects were turned up compared to the console versions. In particular, FFXV: Windows Edition appears to have a much stronger depth-of-field effect turned on, and while some of the resulting blurring looked a little unnatural, the presentation overall looks better as a result. But as the above description makes clear, it was hard to enjoy those little tweaks.

I don't normally solicit comments from Ars readers—y'all rarely need the prompting—but I have a feeling Square Enix representatives will tune into this article, and its comments thread, with an eye toward what exactly PC gamers want in their version of FFXV. The floor is yours.